We've come to what Dantista Chivacci Leonardi calls "the most colorful" bits of Dante's INFERNO. We've come to the usurers, sitting on the brink of the seventh circle of violence, looking out over the eighth circle of fraud, the deeper parts of hell.
This passage is stuffed with synecdoches. Let's talk about why that is and how the poetic bones of COMEDY itself are exposed.
This passage is also often overlooked, a mere footnote, because of the beast of fraud that comes before it and after it and eats up so much attention.
It's also over-interpreted. There's so much effort in the commentary to name each of these bankers sitting on the burning sands. But Dante goes to some length NOT to name them. Rather, the poet implicates the families, rather than the individuals. Why spend time and energy nailing down who these guys are when the poem goes to come lengths to tell you that they are stand-ins (or yes, synecdoches!) for their families?
Here are the segments of this podcast episode for Inferno, Canto XVII, lines 46 - 78 on WALKING WITH DANTE:
[01:19] My English translation of the passage: INFERNO, Canto XVII, lines 46 - 78. If you'd like to read along, you can find this passage on my website, markscarbrough.com.
[04:22] The usurers sit on the edge of violence and look out over the expanse of the eighth circle, the one for the fraudulent--probably because charging interest on loaned money sits right in the ethical juncture between violence and fraud for Dante. And there's another curious bit that rings underneath this passage: Dante's own family may well have been money-lenders.
[12:47] The colorful purses hung around each other their necks. Let's identify the families and talk about why we don't have to name the specific sinners.
[19:00] Why is this passage so colorful?
[20:45] Where are the Jews? Almost any medieval reference to money-lending would always involve some anti-Semitic snark. But these are "good" Christian families. Dante seems to shy away from anti-Semitism just when we'd expect it.
[24:37] These bankers are the fulfillment of Dante's own prophecy back in Canto XVI where he decried the coming of new money into Florence.
[25:45] A final bestial image in the passage: the sluggish and stupid ox.
[27:26] More thoughts on synecdoche. First off, the rhetorical strategy fragments the world into pieces, just as violence and fraud do. But more than that, synecdoche is the rhetorical strategy for COMEDY as a whole.